Is it possible to change the screen of a 42S?

[Waon Shinyoe]

I acquired a 42S recently. It's brand new and with leather case and manual. Unfortunately the screen is pressed down and crashed (my poor English expression...) thus the contrast is quite low and it's hard to read the screen. Now I am considering about buying a 17bii and make a screen change. Is it possible? Thanks.

[John R]

It's doable, but it's not easy, and the case will never be quite as sturdy again because you need to cut through things that were never meant to be cut through. Here is a good primer to HP-42S (or other Pioneer) disassembly:

http://www.hpmuseum.org/guest/brogpion.htm

Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(05-16-2014 02:51 PM)Waon Shinyoe Wrote:  I acquired a 42S recently. It's brand new and with leather case and manual. Unfortunately the screen is pressed down and crashed (my poor English expression...) thus the contrast is quite low and it's hard to read the screen. Now I am considering about buying a 17bii and make a screen change. Is it possible? Thanks.

Other useful links (1) (2) from lyuka...

[Waon Shinyoe]

Thanks for all the replies and help~ I did some research and there is a good news and a bad news...

The good news is that, I decided to follow the second law of thermodynamics and avoid the increasing of the entropy.

The bad news is that, all the 17bii+ on sale in China costs more than 800 yuan, which is more expensive than my 42S itself. And unfortunately no second-hand models available. (Quite reasonable. Who want to buy such a calculator at a price the same of a quad-core mobile phone with 1GB RAM?)

That means I won't do such a change now. Anyway, thanks for the help.

BTW, all series of HP calculators are at ridiculous price from the official agency... The PRIME costs more than 2k yuan... Everyone I know in local calculator community got their PRIME outside China. I guess HP are trying to sell their products to the "rich Chinese government" and the government will set up "Western-Style Experimental Mathematics Class" in some middle and high schools where students can use the expensive "learning tools" for free...

[HP67]

There was a post from a German member that expressed the same anger towards HP.

Living now as I do in a 3rd world country (not that China or Germany are) and understanding a little bit about how retail works over here, I would suspect that the importer, often a so-called sole importer is more responsible for the local pricing and marketing than HP. Here we don't have any official HP import channel for calculators at all. I had to get friends back home buy all my new ones and send them. Maybe you can do a similar deal with people you know living in America or travelling there, etc.

Here the middle man (importer) gets a 2 or 3X markup over American retail. At the end we pay 4X for the same thing I used to buy for X in America.